Savannah’s POV
Six years later.
*Given the recent surge in rogue wolf attacks, the Alliance hereby summons you to serve as combat instructor at the training base…*
I laughed.
One short sound, no warmth in it at all.
The afternoon sun pushed through the thin curtains of my Seattle apartment, turning the dust into floating gold specks.
Two bedrooms, one bathroom, walls that needed repainting.
I’d earned every square foot of it with sweat and stubbornness.
Nothing like the wide, airy rooms I’d grown up in at Silver Creek.
But this one was mine.
Nobody could take it.
The wall above the bookshelf had a few newspaper clippings pinned to it.
*Rising Combat Star Claims Another Victory.*
*Ghost Strike: Fifteen Wins, Zero Losses.*
*How Long Can the Mystery Warrior Keep This Up?*
Each headline was a brick.
I’d laid them one by one, building something out of rubble.
I didn’t like thinking about the first few months after the banishment.
Eighteen years old, stepping across Silver Creek’s border with nothing.
No pack.
No Diana — that absence still ached in a way I’d stopped trying to describe.
Six years ago, their world threw me out.
Now they wanted me back.
I can still remember that the chairs in the clinic waiting room were blue.
I remembered that clearly.
I sat there staring at the test strip while the nurse asked about the father.
I said I didn’t know.
Pinewood Lodge was still just fragments, blurred by whatever Vivienne had put in that water bottle.
The only solid thing I could remember was waking up with a silver chain in my palm — cold, delicate, belonging to someone I’d never identified.
Then the nurse pressed a small device to my abdomen, and I heard it.
Finn’s heartbeat.
Something inside me found its footing in that moment.
Vivienne and Celeste could take everything else.
I wasn’t going to let them take two lives.
“Mom!
Look what I drew at school!”
Finn came charging down the hallway like a small, unstoppable force of nature.
Six years old, sneakers squeaking, smile wide enough to fill the whole room.
He shoved the paper at my face before I’d even turned around.
I looked down.
Two stick figures holding hands under a full moon, lines crooked and uncertain, colors slightly outside the edges.
My throat tightened before I could stop it.
“Teacher said draw your family,” he whispered, leaning close like he was sharing classified information, “so I drew you and me and the moon.
Because we’re special.”
I pulled him in and held him there, face pressed to the top of his head, breathing in the pine-and-sunshine smell that was entirely, specifically *him*.
No pack scent, no Diana, no complicated history — just Finn.
He had my bone structure.
My chin, my nose, the same stubbornness already showing up in the set of his jaw.
But his eyes were amber-brown.
Warm and deep, the kind of color that caught light and held it.
Every time I looked at those eyes, I told myself the same thing: *don’t follow that thread.* I never did.
I’d started training him almost as soon as he was old enough to understand instructions.
Don’t show strength that goes beyond a normal kid.
Don’t let injuries heal too fast where anyone can see.
Don’t let on about everything you sense and hear.
The rules were his armor.
Some days they felt like a cage I’d built for him, and I hated myself a little for it.
“Mom.” He leaned back to look at me, very serious.
“Can we get pizza?
Tommy’s mom gets him pizza every single Friday.”
I laughed, actually laughed, and it loosened something in my chest.
“We can get pizza.”
His expression immediately shifted to celebration.
He pumped his fist and disappeared toward the living room, and I turned back to the letter on the table.
Margaret looked at me from the photo on the bookshelf.
Silver Creek pack uniform, hair back, smile easy and certain.
That particular confidence in her eyes — it had taken me years to understand what it was.
She’d known exactly what she was worth, right up until the moment she gave it away.
She died in a rogue wolf attack.
The same kind that was multiplying across the country right now, the same kind that had the Alliance scrambling to draft instructors for a training base.
I thought about the young wolves who’d die undertrained if this kept escalating.
I thought about what Mom would say if she knew I was sitting in a Seattle apartment reading a recruitment letter instead of doing something about it.
I already knew what she’d say.
“Mom.” Finn’s voice came from the kitchen doorway.
He was hugging his homework folder to his chest, watching me with those too-perceptive eyes.
“You feel sad.”
Six years old and already reading rooms better than most adults.
I didn’t know whether to be proud or worried.
I opened my arms.
He crossed the kitchen in three steps and folded himself into my lap, and I held on.
“I want to ask you something,” I said into his hair.
“Okay.”
“If we moved somewhere new.” I kept my voice level.
“Somewhere with a lot of people who are special like us — what would you think?”
He went still for exactly two seconds.
Then he lifted his head, and those amber-brown eyes lit up from the inside, quick and bright, like a match catching.
“You mean other people who can hear the whispers too?”
“A lot of them,” I said, and managed a smile even while something nervous was turning over in my stomach.
He didn’t answer right away.
He just put his head back down against my chest, quiet for a moment, thinking it over with the seriousness he brought to things that mattered.
Outside, the moon had cleared the rooftops, painting Seattle silver.
“Okay,” Finn said finally, soft and certain.
“If you think it’s good, Mom, then it’s good.”